Studio One is a really fantastic DAW. I come from years of using Cubase and it follows a lot of that paradigm. Everybody has there own preferences in a recording platform and Studio One has really fit that bill for my productions. It is incredibly easy to use, very intuitive and takes the best interface/workflow ideas of many products on the market into its design. Version 2 is such an incredible advancement as well.

I picked up Studio One V2 for ~$200 end of October on a 50% off sale. I am just barely starting to look at it. I am running the 32 bit version so I can slave Ableton Live to it (have not gotten that far yet). It seems to be pretty well received overall and heard very good things on its mastering alone. 2.5 is due out very soon which will add even more functionality to it. I just have to sit down, spend time on the tutorials and manual to wrap my head around things. It is *very* different for me coming from Live back to a traditional DAW package so I will not have things in Live (session view for one, a biggie) and things are done differently or called/named differently coming from Live so it'll be a learning experience. Live 9 is due out Q1 2013 and Suite includes Max4Live (Standard does not BUT if you have prior license you should still be able to use it, and any instruments you bought prior to Live 9 will work in it so it is a hard choice ($299 vs $159 for Suite/Standard (no M4L, missing some instruments/effects (audio to midi for one), and less sound content by a big margin).

So...we'll see how things look in the next few months or so for Live 9. Push however looks cool as hell but is $599....really cool looking controller that'll work w/o LIve but less functionality. Check out the videos at ableton or youtube about Push. I thought about getting it....be neat piece of hardware but can't justify the costs (ROIC) in my opinion.